


In Her Thrall

by flylow



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Witch Mercy, banshee moira
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-13
Updated: 2018-11-03
Packaged: 2019-08-01 05:55:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16279025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flylow/pseuds/flylow
Summary: “Death drowns those it sticks to. Once it’s tied itself to your ankle, nothing keeps you from sinking with it. But you—” She paused to study her. Angela, uncomfortable, shifted her weight against each foot. “It’s as though you’ve buoyed up its weight.”





	1. 1460; Lucerne, Switzerland

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by Moira's halloween skin, banshee folklore, real-world historical events, and overwatch canon, here's my take on the whole witch AU. Enjoy!

A single barred window cut three squares of moonlight on the floor of her cell. She knelt beside them and dipped her hands blue to inspect the grime packed against the beds of her nails: dirt, from the cracks between the stones, and rust, from the worn iron gate locking her in. Moisture had long seeped into this prison’s bones, and in the three days since she’d arrived, had stained her clothes with a smell like stale beer and mildew.

Angela waited until the old baker in the cell across the way had rolled over in her sleep to wedge her fingers up through her sleeves. One small wad of cloth hid in each arm, pressed against her skin, in chrysalis. She pulled them out between her knuckles and let them decompress a while in the palm of her hand. The hem of her skirt, now jagged, was a small price to pay for the peace she hoped to spin from these cocoons. She packed them so tightly into her ears that a sharp pressure grew between her temples.

She took a seat on the floor, in the far corner of her cage, where she’d tried and failed to find rest the past three nights. And then, she waited. With her eyes closed and her head pressed to the wall, she waited.

But when it came, the cry won out.

A horridly heavy sound that stole her breath on sorrow—this disembodied grievance tied a weight to Angela’s heart that made her want to curl in on herself and weep. She held her hands to her ears, but the keening rattled at the bars of her cell, slipped down from the window overhead, echoed against all stone, until she was certain the song had taken root inside her head. Her makeshift earplugs traitorously helped trap it there.

The pain of a hundred mourning mothers traveled on a single voice, and if she listened close, she could pick out love, too, in its lament. That made it worse—to intimately feel this woman’s heartbreak. Angela's stomach turned, and she surely would have been sick if she had anything to throw up.

“Please, _please_ …” she said, and she held her head against her knees, as though making herself small might help the sound forget her. “Let me rest—just for one night, I’m begging you.” She only had so many left.

“Oh, shut your mouth, Ziegler!” one of her neighbors called. “We're not doing this shit again tonight. If you’re going mad, at least do us all a favor and keep your moaning to yourself.”

Whatever haunted her felt too real to be of her mind’s making, but perhaps that was the most damning evidence of all. And if she weren’t already on her way to madness, this voice, with all its woes, would surely steer her there before death took her.  

She pulled the useless cotton plugs from her ears, threw them across the room, and it was when they rolled out of her cell that she resigned herself to insanity. Because after bouncing between the bars, those two white shells stopped still before a pair of shackled feet. Outside her cage, there stood a specter, a phantom-pale woman who wore death in the silver of her hair, in the hollows of her cheeks, and in the tears of her tattered clothing. Her voided gaze struck a familiar weight in Angela’s chest, and in doing so, pronounced itself married to the voice that so consistently stole away her sleep. She was just the same as her song, in that Angela might not have noticed her beauty, so shrouded by despair, if she weren’t so deeply, morbidly enchanting.

Angela licked her lips, opened her mouth slowly, and as she fumbled dumbly to find her tongue, realized she wasn’t the only one frozen curious by the encounter. That gave her courage enough.

“What do you grieve for? What’s caused you so much sorrow?” She chose this line of questioning over others, because after sharing in her pain for three nights straight, there really was no matter more pressing.

No sooner than she’d finished speaking did a rattle like the clap of a dozen doves’ wings rise on a cloud of mist to spirit the specter away. The wisps of white she left in her wake thinned over long seconds, and once they’d cleared, only the old baker, sleeping in the cell opposite, remained.

* * *

 

With their sentences pronounced, the prisoners thought on nothing else than the hours strung between themselves and death—and then there was Angela, who, despite herself, filled that time losing herself in pictures pulled from her own head. She drew her specter in pieces: the ornate markings crowning her brow, her thin lips, the band snaked around her neck, her delicate collarbones below it, her spindly fingers, the regal air she carried in her remnants of fine dress, the pale skin beneath. The whole came from these fragments coalesced, and Angela stared past her enclosure, eager for her muse to reappear in her creation’s place. 

When the song came, long after sunset, it washed up to Angela softly. It kissed behind her ears, almost shy—a far cry from the inundation of her senses yesterday—and Angela bore through it without a word. Those keening notes sent shivers down her spine now, rather than wrack it with tremors. The sadness trickled to her stomach in careful doses, where it stagnated and eventually flushed away with manageable upset. But Angela worried at her bottom lip nonetheless, biting ever harder with every minute, ever hour, of wailing that passed uninterrupted.

The crying stopped, in time. And while the tail end of its melody still echoed in the shells of her ears, Angela dared not peel her eyes from where she’d seen the specter the night before. She startled when a voice—deep, feminine, so softly bewitching a sound it made her heady—traveled to her from the opposite corner of her cell.

“My family,” the specter said—because it was, indeed, her specter, returned. No longer checkered behind iron bars, she stood just shy of dipping her feet in those square pools of moonlight dropped against the floor. Angela rose quickly, and even with the length of the room keeping them at bay, could tell this woman towered easily a head above her. She stayed with her back flat against the wall, made no move to breach what distance had been instated between them—a show of respect, and of caution. The specter studied her as she waited.

“What?” Angela asked, only slowly coming to her senses.

“You asked,” she answered, clear and haunting, the chime of a bell lost in thick fog, “for whom I weep.”

“Oh—right.” She cleared her throat before offering her condolences. “I’m sorry for your loss… They must have meant a great deal to you.”

She swore the specter smiled, but that small pull of her lips lasted no longer than the skipped beat of Angela’s heart that followed. And then seconds passed in silence. They drank each other in in equal measure, while Angela anxiously sought some question that might keep the specter from vanishing—because surely the sorry state of her, underfed and unkempt and sleep deprived, would only hold interest for so long.

Her eyes found the cuffs tethered to her ankles, and the chain hung from her waist. “Are you—were you a prisoner, too?”

“A prisoner?” She paused before deciding, “Not in the sense you mean.”

Purposefully cryptic—but an answer was an answer all the same, so Angela, curious still, pressed her luck, “Are you a ghost?”

The specter scoffed. She turned, and Angela felt her heart jump to her throat, scared that she would fade to nothing all over again. But she only paced, arms held behind her back, the beginnings of a circle of which Angela was the center. An almost human weight latched to her footsteps, her demonstration purposive—as though to show Angela the senselessness of her suggestion.

“Full of questions,” she said, not chiding, merely observing.

“A ‘no’ could have done fine,” Angela said with a roll of her eyes before she could pull the reins in on her words.

No answer came of the specter, who stared vacantly past the bars of the cell, as though under a spell, as though Angela’s existence had started to escape her notice. Determined to capture her attention, she tried again, “When I burn tomorrow, all my questions will die with me. So I may as well ask away now.”

“Burn—that, you might,” the specter said, and her voice was so delicate, and her German so peculiarly accented, that her answer almost slipped by Angela before she could catch it. “But you won’t die, not tomorrow. Not for a long time, I suspect.”

“Are you saving me? My own guardian angel?” Angela teased, because something told her, whatever this being was, that she’d take it no better than being called a ghost.

Her laugh caught Angela off guard. The sound skipped, hollow and beautiful, between the stone walls of their cell for just long enough that she longed to hear more once it was over. The circle the specter traced around her grew tight as she stepped forward. Angela’s heart raced and her blood rushed when their orbits clipped, easily within reach. She wanted to touch her. More than anything, she wanted to take her hand, or her face, or the bared dip of her waist, and feel their skin together.

The specter froze as suddenly as the desire had swept over Angela, as though sensing her compulsion. “You’ll do a fine job of saving yourself unaided,” she said, serious again.

“And the other women here? The ones that are left?”

They’d already dragged the old baker away that morning, along with another of her neighbors. The smell of the flames that had taken them lingered in the air still, blown through the bars of her window on a breeze now and then.

She shook her head, and explained, “Death drowns those it sticks to. Once it’s tied itself to your ankle, nothing keeps you from sinking with it. But you—” She paused to study her. Angela, uncomfortable, shifted her weight against each foot. “It’s as though you’ve buoyed up its weight.”

“You’re saying I’m immortal?” Disbelief, derision, was hard to keep from her voice. She wanted to laugh at herself now. “It’s more likely that I’m insane, after all.”

“None are immortal, not truly,” the specter answered, ignoring Angela’s musing on madness. She gazed up towards the moon through the narrow window for a long while, and Angela lost herself in the quiet as she studied the sharp lines of her profile.

“I’ll be leaving, soon,” she said, eventually.

“Stay until they take me.”

“I can’t.”

“Then answer more of my questions, at least, if I’m to believe all this is real.”

The specter sighed, suddenly seeming very weary. “We’ll meet again. Ask your questions then, if you still have them.”

“I didn’t invite you to sit in my cell, you know,” she said, growing frustrated, and a little desperate, for some reason that escaped her, to keep this woman close. “You’ve raised more questions than you’ve answered.”

“You can hear me, can’t you? And you can see me,” she told her. “There’s all the answer you need.”

“To prove I’ve lost my mind?”

The specter’s eyes drew lines between points of Angela’s cell—the cuffs along the wall they’d trapped her in on her first night, the empty wooden bowl she scraped crumbs from when they fed her once a day, the sorry bench she tried to sleep on without success, and the shadow cast by the moon against the two bars over her window. Her attention lingered, finally, against the stone wall, and Angela realized, after a moment, that she stared past it, rather than at it. Beyond the block of her cell, beyond the gates at the prison’s threshold—at the great pyre standing sentinel over the city and those it sent to trial.

“To prove that you might be just what they say you are.”


	2. 1816; County Wicklow, Ireland

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait guys, this is out later than I meant. Thanks so much for the positive response so far!

The cottage floated on long grass, hued sea green by the beacon that was the moon hanging overhead. Waves rolled through those blades on the wind, over where farmers used to drive their cattle to turn the soil. Age and hard weather had caved one side of the house in some decades ago, but otherwise, its wattle and daub held strong enough not to sink under the weight of disrepair.   

After a full day’s worth of travel, of chasing a melody stifled for hundreds of years in her memory, Angela’s discovery of this dilapidated little home blew fresh air into her lungs. She’d heard its first notes on a wind cast across the ocean and drifted up the shores of Saint-Malo. From there, she’d followed its echoes like stepping-stones across the Celtic Sea, and then up a ways to a small townland south of Dublin. The song was just as she remembered—laden with sorrow, winged up by beauty. Three and a half centuries had offered more than enough time to tune her intuitions with, though, and with its first layers peeled back, she could see what else hid in her specter’s chagrin: a force powerfully macabre, born of playing cat’s cradle with death knotted around its fingers.

The simple lock bolting the cottage’s discolored door kept gusts of wind and the cold they carried from pushing it back against its hinges. No obstacle to Angela—but she knocked, of course. Her knuckles found wood twice before the click of metal signaled a latch pulling back to invite her in.

A wave of her hand summoned life into the oil lamp set on the table, into its sister perched on a narrow shelf against the wall opposite, and finally, into the firebox. The flames there reached madly for the hearth and the tamped down clay stretched beneath her feet. She’d expected the smell of dust to lay thick in the air, but found the sharp, clean smell of wood instead—pleasant, and almost homey. Only a stack of pots and pans rusted orange by disuse betrayed whoever dwelled here as perhaps less than living.  

“Please, make yourself at home.” That voice warmed her chest with its soft tones, not as uninviting as it had probably meant to be, and Angela smiled before she could help it. Just as peculiarly drawing and withdrawn as she remembered, the specter lingered at the threshold leading into the adjoining room—the side of the house not kicked in by the wind and rain—as though teetering still between the lonely dark she’d emerged from and Angela’s presence, haloed by candlelight.

“You were right,” Angela told her. “About my finding you again.”

“I thought you’d make better time than four hundred years.”

“Three hundred and fifty six—Don’t exaggerate.” She knew because that year marked her making as much as it did their meeting. “And besides, I’ve been busy.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” the specter said, and Angela didn’t know whether to bristle at the disparagement, or let her pride bloom at the interest thinly veiled beneath it.

She paced across the room to pick up a tiny rag doll propped against a stack of books on the shelf, reading spines in the process, knowing the specter’s eyes tracked her all the while, waiting.

“How did you find me?”

Angela turned after placing the toy back where she’d found it sleeping. “Just the same way I found you the first time.”

“From how far?”

“Brittany. Your voice carries.”

The corners of the specter’s mouth dipped down and her lips thinned at that, but only for an instant.

“I haven’t met anyone like you, you know,” Angela continued. “No one else of your kind—in hindsight, I guessed horribly, the first time.” Ghosts had flown along her path since, empty creatures, and she understood why the suggestion might have offended.

“First time in Ireland?”

She nodded.

The specter smiled. “All those three hundred and fifty six years of knowledge must be good for something, little witch. Take a guess.”

Angela hated guessing games where answer could easily be afforded. She sensed this, though, served some greater, more personal end—a challenge, maybe. A chance to prove herself.

“A fairy,” she tried, with confidence. “Not born, but made—you were human, once.”

For the first time since Angela had stepped into her cottage, the specter moved. Angela’s breath stuck in her lungs the closer she drew—with firelight licking up her skin, and catching in her eyes, she seemed much more tangible than those century-old memories of a being disappeared to mist between prison walls. “And?” she pressed.

“You speak with death,” Angela obliged. “It whispers to you ceaselessly.”

The specter left only a foot between them once she stopped, raised one hand up to readjust what Angela had disturbed on the shelf, and let the bottom of her sleeve brush against her shoulder in the process.

The smell of cool rain and warm blackthorn intoxicated her softly, almost beyond her notice, and Angela couldn’t help the parting of her lips—as though she might chance a taste of her, too, on the air. How desperately she wanted to trap this creature’s attention, to spark a need as strong as that that pooled in her chest and sunk low in her belly when they stood so close. The feeling was new, exhilarating, unexplainable, and, for all those reasons, terrifying.

“A portent of death—but only to family,” she explained. “They call me _bean sí_.”

“And what do I get to call you?”

The banshee paused, as though weighing risk, but answered nonetheless, “Máire.” The way she spoke it made Angela think she hadn’t shared it in a long while.

“Máire,” she tried the shape of it in her mouth, albeit without tapping her _r_ in precisely the right way. And then, she offered her own name to level the scales, “I’m Angela.”

Ever one not to let an opportunity pass without chase, Angela, perhaps too eagerly, introduced her hand into the space between them. A charge floated there, turbulent, with Angela’s will at one end, and the banshee’s reserved distance at the other. Máire dispelled it by meeting Angela precisely where she wanted her.

The witch had never known anything more sating than this—than Máire’s hand folded against her own—and yet, it left her starving. That a spark in Máire’s eyes, bright as the flames crackling at her back and warm as the touch of her skin, spoke of a need not unlike her own lit a breathless heat up her neck. A bit of want was more than enough to work with. She’d loosen it between her fingers.

She rested her gaze, heavy already, onto Máire’s lips for a beat too long, and wetted her own with a pass of her tongue. And then she looked away, down towards the shadows breathing against the floor, as she let go. She unspun the knot they’d tied so that its ropes still kept the shape they’d made together.

Máire drew her hand back quickly, as though Angela had burned her, but when their eyes met again, she couldn’t quite mask the interest that lingered there. She turned and made for one of the two chairs that faced each other across the table, and Angela found it an odd picture—a spirit playing human with all its borrowings of the living.

“Brittany. Quite a ways from home,” she remarked with an air that struck as too deliberately conversational. “Unless you’ve moved from Switzerland since last I saw you.”

“Switzerland is still home,” Angela said quickly. “I travel often, but… Right now, it’s different. I couldn't—I needed… something, I guess. Anything different.” She sounded exhausted.

A great freeze had crackled across the Rhine, crept down to the heart of Switzerland through the rivers and lakes that made its veins, and held it now in paralysis. Heavy rain only helped the frost along. It seeped through the soil until there was nothing left to kill. And then, it moved up, to take the earth in flood, drowning what life above it had missed on its way down.  

“You picked the wrong place to escape to,” Máire said, watching her.

“There’s no _right_ place—it’s everywhere, this misery. Home just feels like the worst place, when there’s nothing I can do for it.” When she looked down at her hands, which she’d started wringing, the firelight that played against them reminded her of a young girl she’d met just weeks ago. Warm and red as the blood that poured from the mangled flesh around her wrist—half severed, gaping, thanks to the short axe the farrier had brought against it. Without the witch, she’d have lost her hand. “Hunger makes thieves. Desperation, riots—the body count doubles when they start killing each other. Over scraps.”

“The fever does that well enough here,” the banshee said, and with her voice this somber, Angela couldn’t help but think of the way it sounded in song. “They don’t have to kill each other to die off twice as fast.”

“I noticed,” Angela said, soft, even though Máire didn’t look her way to see it. “The village just east of here—the souls there writhe as they die. None of that eerie quiet that comes of fading just from hunger.”

“My family lives there,” Máire told her. “A good part of it, at least.”

That the banshee’s cry had flown the Celtic Sea before crashing onto land should have told Angela that the wind backing its wings heralded something grimmer still than the death of one woman trapped in a prison cell some four hundred years ago. The way she hung on her chair more than she sat in it—Angela had always remembered her presence as something regal—spoke as to how draining her nights must have been, lately. She wondered if her voice ever grated, like hands worked too long against a washboard, after all her wailing.

Angela stood only to sit on the floor with her legs folded beneath her, so that she knelt at Máire’s side. Humbled and complaisant—she knew it was the only way to coax the banshee, to prove she neither posed threat nor sought control through her proposition.

She waited for Máire to look at her, dared alight a touch on her knee once she had, and said, “Let me help.”

* * *

Ceallach O’Deorain, six years old, lay coffined in damp sheets. His breath rose and fell so quickly, so shallowly, that Angela, from the foot of the bed, saw in the rhythm of his chest pushing out against the blanket the seizing of a frantic heartbeat. His brother’s corpse, still two days fresh, was buried in a plot of dirt behind the house. If Angela had stopped by sooner, she might have done something for him, too.

She unfastened the buttons holding together her overcoat before draping it over a chair pressed to the wall—as far away, it seemed, as it could sit from the boy while still remaining in the room. She stole the large oil lantern that sat beside it and brought it to rest atop a heavy wooden chest to the right of the bed. The light cast a sickly yellow glow against the pale face peaking out from beneath the sheets. Ceallach stirred at the disturbance, at Angela’s weight come to join his against the mattress. Dazed beyond delirium by the fever, he whimpered, and writhed weakly—resigned already to the pain that had leeched his strength from the inside out. She doubted his dismembered consciousness would grasp anything she said, but Angela hushed him with soft words nonetheless, and placed a gentle hand to his forehead. The mess of red hair that pooled onto his pillow stuck dark against his brow, and around his ears, for all that he’d sweat. 

“I’m here to help, Ceallach,” she told him, in English. “You’re going to be alright.” Either her voice had soothed enough, or the sickness had tired him, because he let her peel back the sheets without protest. When she lifted his shirt up, he trembled at the cool air come to overtake the swelter of his skin.

Angela studied those red dots splattered across his chest, and Máire, from the other side of the bed, studied her in practice.

“I hope you know what you’re doing, Miss,” the boy’s father said from where he stood watch by the doorway. “Or the fever will have you, too, before the month ends.”

“I’ll be fine,” Angela assured him. “Your son will be, too. I’ll just need a moment with him.”

He nodded after the witch had caught his gaze a while—convinced by magic he couldn’t notice. The dirt floor swallowed away the sound of his footsteps, so Angela waited with her ear outstretched to make certain he’d gone far enough before turning back to the boy.

“You’re so certain you’ll be able to save him?” Máire asked, more curious than skeptical. She looked to Ceallach—still shaking, pupils wide and unfocused—with a pained fondness that spoke to the intimate ties she bore to those of her blood. Warmth bloomed in Angela at having caught it, and helped along the familiar heat of magic course down from her chest to the tips of her fingers.

“I am.”

A celestial glow haloed Angela’s palms where they hovered face down over Ceallach’s heart—thrumming with a power that rivaled death. Her magic was clear and pure as crystal, and Máire not only watched, but _listened_ as she poured life from her fingers, because she could hear it, if only faintly—a song forged on the edge of glass. It dropped and shattered notes around the room with a languor that seemed to warp the passage of time as it passed between the three of them—witch, banshee, and child.

When her healing ceased, a startling quiet took to the air. Angela looked to Máire, and found her staring at the boy, expression designedly effaced. He slumbered, carrying peace where pain had carved harsh lines into his face moments before. She stood from the bed to draw the blanket back over his chest, confident that his fever would break entirely within the hour.

Moira swallowed, and then said, “Thank you.” If her voice betrayed anything, it was gratitude first and foremost. Her awe was a gentle, muted thing.

Angela smiled, happy to have done some good—happy to have made Máire happy by it. “Let’s go,” she said. “His mother is next.”

* * *

Angela took the night growing old without wrenching one cry from the banshee as testament to a job well done. Ahead of her, Máire shuffled her bare feet through the long grass surrounding home, pressing into the earth a path for the witch to follow. The frayed lengths of her sleeves, and of the overskirt cradling her hips, trailed out behind her on the wind. They whipped their torn heads every which way, as though searching—reaching for Angela, who walked a dozen paces back. Now and then, for only a sliver of a second, the tears between them crossed patterns like lace fabric into her dress. And with the bright of the moon pulling white from its seams, Angela thought Máire looked something of a bride in her wedding gown. She moved unburdened tonight, as though weight had been lifted from those shackles around her ankles.

She left the door of her cottage ajar for Angela to slip in behind her, and once she had, it creaked shut for the bolt to find its place into the frame. The fireplace breathed heat into the room by cinders of Angela’s magic left crackling in its maw.

“That girl in the cell…” Máire said as she stared absently at the glowing embers. “You’re just the same, and yet—a different being altogether. You’ve grown much.”

Angela pulled her gloves off with a tug to their fingers and laid them flat against the aged table. “Four centuries. More than enough time to make a witch out of a human, no?”

“You were a witch, then, too.”

She remembered too little of her twenty-six year infancy to say if she’d ever felt magic in her before that night—before it had wrapped her head to toe, remade her. Máire had been right about her burning. The fire had gnawed a heat up her legs that dulled only when it’d pierced through to bone. But by then, the smell and smoke escaped from her flesh had already slithered through her mouth and nose. Stuck thick to her lungs. She’d coughed, and panic at not being able to draw breath—no one had told her she’d choke on herself like that—had coiled around her neck until her throat clamped shut.

She rose the following morning from where flowers had once stretched their roots, with a fresh fear of fire that wouldn’t fade until flames danced at her bidding, nearly a hundred years later. Earth clung to her dress, and colored the corners of her eyes and the lines around her nose. Beneath her skin, unmarred as it had been before the burning, the warmth of magic spread its limbs along paths drawn by her veins.

Sometimes, she wondered if the two of them, she and the woman burned at the stake, were truly one and the same. Death had cradled her, spat her out, and made her new. She’d spent the years that followed learning how to walk all over again.

“Not a true witch,” Angela said. She paused and took her lip between her teeth, thinking. “I think I can call myself as much, now—but then, I have little to measure myself against. Just my own progress.” Something dropped into the air at that, and Angela, hopeful, let it hang there, but when Máire spoke, it wasn’t to take the bait.

“Your healing,” she said, instead. She pulled herself from the fire to lean against the table, where she found Angela’s gloves—still holding in their leather the warmth of her hands. She fingered at a rune carved discreetly at one cuff, so as to be mistaken for a simple maker’s brand. “It’s a beautiful thing.”

Angela beamed. “Thank you,” she said, too caught by the banshee’s gaze, and her rich voice, to remember modesty. Her tongue peaked out to wet her lips just before they stretched into smile, and that the gesture held Máire’s attention to her mouth pleased her. But the interest flickered away, turned off, before Angela could bask in it too long.

“From where did you learn it?” she asked. Her voice floated languidly when she sang, it ran gentle as water when she spoke, but now, it helmed command that Angela had never heard it helm before. She answered quickly.

“I’m self-taught, mostly. Trial and error—and grimoires, of course, when they’re at my disposal.” Máire’s silence aggravated her more than it unsettled her—as though Angela’s answer hadn’t been what she’d been looking for. “That…perhaps doesn’t sound too reassuring,” she backpedaled. “But I did practice on plants, and then animals, before moving to humans. I’d never risk a life—by my magic, or otherwise.”

Máire hummed. Her long fingers wrapped around the edge of the table, her eyes narrowed just a twitch as her gaze dipped down Angela’s body to rest at her feet, and her lips thinned, as though sewn tighter together on themselves. With the morose cloud she’d found her sitting in dispelled, Angela could finally see the pride and poise mantling her shoulders again. It pulled her upright with an unhuman grace, as though on strings tied to all the forces that made the cosmos turn, when she decided to stand.

“My understanding of magic isn’t as intimate as yours is,” she said, voiced redressed in that gentle, hollow manner that caught Angela like a spell. “But it doesn’t take a witch to tell today’s efforts must have drained you.”

“Nothing food and rest can’t help.”

“I don’t have anything to eat, but there’s a bed in the room over.” Máire walked around her, setting a couple arm’s lengths between them, and stopped by the doorway, just where Angela had first seen her the night before. “Take it, if you like.”

For a witch to set camp somewhere—or to magic her way into the good graces of a villager with an extra cot to spare—was a simple thing, and knowing that the banshee knew as much made Angela thrill at her offer. She followed her into the bedroom with the oil lamp from the table in hand, leaving the other to die where they left it on the bookshelf.

Máire’s room betrayed that she’d lived more than several lifetimes. The alchemical alembic stored alongside a retort and a handful of other modern chemistry tools, Angela was old enough to recognize, but those tall manuscripts hung against the walls were more than she could make sense of. A long spear and an iron sword, forged unlike any she’d seen before, were propped against a dark chest at the corner of the room. Atop it, piles of jewelry and trinkets sat cradled by earthenware bowls, and Angela could only guess that more of the same filled those boxes beside them. She walked to the workbench facing the door to read what book Máire had left open there, and grew surprised to find German on the page—a philosophical text just about a decade old. The base of the oil lamp met wood with a clunk as she dropped it to take a closer look.

“I’m slower at getting through it than I’d like to admit,” Máire said, watching from where the light only cast a soft afterglow.

“It’s far from easy reading.”

“I have the time.”

Angela pinched the pages between her fingers, and with her thumb dragging against their corners, rustled them back down against the cover. She let her gaze roam the room one last time before settling it on Máire.

“It’s strange, that you’ve kept so many human habits,” she remarked, as though speaking to herself. “Why?”

“Would it please you if I sat on my hands for the next hundred years?”

“Hobbies and keepsakes—I’ve met spirits and fairies who’ve hoarded both. But never any who kept a home as human as this one.” Angela backed up until the sheepskin cover hanging over the lip of the bed pressed against the backs of her knees. She sat and ran her fingers through soft fluff.

“Few things ground me as well,” Máire answered with vulnerable honesty Angela hadn’t expected. “You should have seen me the year after I died—cooking, eating, trying to sleep, just to stay sane. I suppose natural habits are hard to break.”

Since Angela slept most nights despite magic having erased any routine need to, she understood what Máire meant. Unwinding after a long day, forgetting the world’s troubles to sink between plump pillows and warm blankets—the motions of it set the tides in her right. The human part of Angela suffered for those nights she didn't loose her hair and let her mind wash dreams downstream.

“They are,” Angela agreed. For all the misery it could wreak, humanity bred an abundance of little pleasures far too enjoyable to cast away.

From where she sat, Angela leaned over to unlace her boots and slip them from her feet. Máire watched as she squared them neatly by the foot of the bed, and with her attention in hand, Angela broke the buttons holding together the front of her dress without missing a beat. A smile touched her lips when the banshee looked away, suddenly taken with the way the flame fluttered in the oil lamp resting on the desk.

The susurrus of fabric pooling at Angela’s feet as she rose from the bed trickled over to Máire through the floor. The footsteps that followed froze her stiff. As much as she wanted to disappear the distance between them, Angela didn’t touch her. Instead, she hopped onto the desk, next to that German text thrown open on its back, inviting Máire to look.

Her cotton chemise, its first few fastenings undone, left one side of her collar bared. It weighed enough to hug her breasts, but not enough to hide the shape of her nipples kissed hard by the cold. Its hem rode further up when she played with it—past that soft line in her thigh, bunching at her hips—and Angela did nothing to fix it.

Something ravenous hid in the dark of Máire’s eyes, but the restless flame sat beside Angela scared it away every time she thought it’d come to eat out of her palm. She leaned a little closer, hands by where her knees hooked the edge of the desk, and didn’t even have to tilt down her head to look up at Máire through her lashes.

“I think often of you, you know,” she confessed, “I have since that day.”

Máire’s quiet struggle against the line Angela had hooked her by manifested in the tightening of her jaw, in the slight flare of her nostrils, and in the bobbing of her throat as she swallowed. Her gaze remained fixed resolutely to Angela’s face, and Angela’s face only.

“Haven’t you thought of me?” she pressed, but it wasn’t enough. So she slid off the desk, so near Máire now that a few inches more would bring them flush together. “Aren’t you happy to see me?”

The banshee closed her eyes, and, after several long, steady breaths, came out of her trance as unreadable to Angela as those colorful manuscripts on the walls—just when she thought she’d started to scratch at something. When Máire smiled, then, it disarmed her so completely that the web she’d started to spin between them unraveled faster than she could hold its ends together.

“It is nice to have company,” she said, and the sound of her voice, close enough to hit Angela’s lips if only she leaned forward, sent something electric down her spine.

Angela remembered the way Máire’s tongue had brushed the syllables of her own name when she’d introduced herself. She remembered the warmth of their skin together, and the hunger she’d caught in Máire’s eyes before she’d pulled her hand away. She remembered the genuine surprise she’d read in her the first time their souls had crossed all those years ago, in that prison in Lucerne.

“You haven’t been close to someone in a long time.” A statement, not a question, that made one corner of Máire’s painted smile wither for a moment.

“Spirits and fairies—especially those entrapped by death… They don’t always make for very sane or pleasant company, unfortunately,” Máire admitted on a whisper.

“If it makes you feel any better, almost all human company feels empty, in its own way, after you’ve lived long enough,” Angela said, as though sharing as much might cover some wound in Máire that needed stitching.

“It doesn’t, but that’s interesting to know.”

“I think it’s the curse that comes of witnessing too much time, of knowing you have infinitely more ahead of you. You start to lose touch with the little fears and worries that made you human. It staggers your existence with theirs—not enough to throw you on a different plane, but enough to feel… like something’s off, or missing.” Angela, lost in reflection, but no less taken by her desires, brought her hand up absently to trace the edge of Máire’s torn shirt with the tips of her fingers. “It’s rare, and beautiful, to meet someone who understands it all.”

“Our loneliness isn’t all the same.”

The banshee’s voice broke her from her own head, and when she realized her hand hadn’t yet been shoved away, Angela let her touch climb softly up the skin stretched over Máire’s ribs.

“It’s similar enough.”

Máire leaned into her hand, Angela swore it, but it might just have been her gentle breathing pressing against her palm. She wondered if, should she travel a little higher up the ladder of her ribs, she might feel a heartbeat hidden in her chest. Máire’s long fingers circling her wrist left it to her imagination.

“Do you know what it is I wish I could do, to chase that feeling away?”

Angela’s pulse fluttered frantically against where Máire held her. She parted her lips to answer, but could only shake her head. For all the magic she’d known, there was nothing that flooded her with such a drunken, euphoric rush as the banshee reaching out to touch her. After a night spent pining for her attention, of feeling as though she’d drown without it, a blessed sense of fulfillment whorled inside her at the suggestion alone of having appealed to Máire’s desires.

“Sleep,” Máire said simply as she released her hold.

It crushed Angela’s fledgling feeling of completion underfoot.

The force with which Máire had spun her in the opposite direction pulled her back a step, and stuck something heavy and sick to her chest. She blinked up at her, waiting to hear how she’d go on, hoping, at the very least, that she would.

“I wish I had the luxury of losing track of the world—of my worries, and my boredom, and my loneliness—because lying awake, and watching the days bleed into each other… it’s a special brand of isolation I’m not sure I’ll ever grow entirely used to. It’d be nice to turn it off for a short while.”

The bed, surrounded by all of Máire’s collections of centuries passed, suddenly held an empty weight between its sheets that Angela hadn’t noticed before. She imagined the banshee stretched across it after long nights spent in death’s company, longing for a quiet that would never come, until the sun swallowed away the moon to start the day over again.

Angela felt a coldness hollow out a place in front of her when Máire walked around her, towards the desk. She picked up the oil lamp and dimmed its flame before moving it to the table stool beside the bed.

“Do sleep well, if you can,” she told her.

Angela took it as her cue to follow, and sat against the sheepskin precisely where she had when she’d started to undress.

“Will I see you in the morning?” she asked, before Máire could turn away, and something of the moment reminded her of the way the banshee had left her the last time they’d seen each other.

“Sure,” Máire said.

And then Angela dared stop her just once more, to ask what had been burning a hole through the back of her throat since she’d left it there, unspoken, the night before. “Wait,” she said. “I—I have a question.”

Máire froze, back facing her, but with her head turned to catch her out of the corner of her eye. “What is it?”

It left Angela all at once, firm and confident, despite the odd tension it iced through the room. “Do you know of any others like me?” she asked. “Other witches?”

A part of her, inexplicably possessive and preemptively jealous, hoped Máire would say she didn’t, even though an answer in the affirmative was what she'd sought every time she'd asked that question over the years.

“No,” came the banshee’s answer after a long while. It left Angela both relieved and disappointed. “You’re the first I’ve met.”


End file.
